[ Pretty girls make pretty graves - and crafty policemen follow. It isn't the first colleague he's lost to women, or weapons, or vice, and in their industry, it's hardly to be Leon's last. Still, he's never before buried a man a year his senior, who's successfully consigned every oath once happily taken to flagrant abandon in less than three weeks' time. He's hardly as much in awe of Harris' weakness to fall in love and complicity with the drug dealing suspect he was meant to interrogate; a beautiful face and a bleeding heart never make the best of arrangements, and he'd heard word that Harris' wife had only recently filed for separation. And of course the young woman's former associates would have done away with both her and her recent, badge-bearing paramour as soon as soon as word spread that he'd secured her freedom.
No. What astounded - what astounds Leon even now, leaving him to toy helplessly with his spoon, twirling it in the second cup of Count D's tea that he's left to spoil, untouched - is that he had no gut feeling about it. He took his dinner with the man two hours before the... incident, and he found nothing out of the ordinary with anything put before him.
He can't quite say when he left the funeral to arrive at the Count's, or how, or perhaps why. The shopkeeper won't ask, he supposes. It's all very well to come and intrude on Count D's tolerable evening, and make a mess of his plans, and ruin his tea, because there'll be no questions. That's what his instinct says, but, then, he's been wrong this week before.
In the end, it occurs to him to treat his host with something the littlest bit past bleary-eyed silence. ]
...sorry. [ He sets his cup down - repicks it - sets it again, quietly. ] I didn't bring you anything this time. That's... being a bad guest, isn't it?
.12
No. What astounded - what astounds Leon even now, leaving him to toy helplessly with his spoon, twirling it in the second cup of Count D's tea that he's left to spoil, untouched - is that he had no gut feeling about it. He took his dinner with the man two hours before the... incident, and he found nothing out of the ordinary with anything put before him.
He can't quite say when he left the funeral to arrive at the Count's, or how, or perhaps why. The shopkeeper won't ask, he supposes. It's all very well to come and intrude on Count D's tolerable evening, and make a mess of his plans, and ruin his tea, because there'll be no questions. That's what his instinct says, but, then, he's been wrong this week before.
In the end, it occurs to him to treat his host with something the littlest bit past bleary-eyed silence. ]
...sorry. [ He sets his cup down - repicks it - sets it again, quietly. ] I didn't bring you anything this time. That's... being a bad guest, isn't it?